Stanford Report, August 22, 2001
STS co-chair Paula Findlen researching history of world's first female professor
BY JOHN SANFORD
"I am profoundly attracted to individuals in the past who aspired to know everything," writes history Professor Paula Findlen in her faculty profile. "It still seems like a worthy goal."
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| Paula Findlen Photo: L.A. Cicero |
It's a fitting sentiment for Findlen's current position as a co-chair of the Program in Science, Technology and Society (STS), a course of study that spans a variety of disciplines -- sociology, anthropology, computer science and engineering, to name just a few.
A historian of science and medicine, Findlen arrived at Stanford in 1996 after serving a nine-year stint at the University of California-Davis, where she developed a program similar to Stanford's STS program. (After being appointed STS chair, she asked Professor Robert McGinn of the Management Science and Engineering Department to join her as a co-chair.)
Meanwhile, Findlen has been working on a book, to be published by Knopf, about women in science and the universities during the 18th century. She is focusing particularly on one female scholar, Laura Bassi.
Bassi was the first woman in history to be appointed to a university professorship, with virtually all rights and privileges that accompany the position (including a healthy salary). She taught physics at the University of Bologna and conducted experiments based on Newtonian natural philosophy. In a recent interview with Stanford Report, Findlen talked about what put her on the path for this latest book project.
SR: How did you become interested in Laura Bassi?
FINDLEN: Quite a number of years ago I was finishing a project on natural-history museums. I was doing research at archives in Italy and just started to wonder what else was in the archive. I remembered these stories of women who supposedly took degrees at Italian universities; the specific name I remembered was Laura Bassi. One thing led to another, and soon I realized that I had a very interesting regional case study of something that was absolutely unheralded elsewhere. Italy was the only place in Europe, much less anywhere else during the 18th century or before, where women were taking degrees and where several held professorships. So at that point I was faced with a greater historical question: Why? What were the preconditions that made this possible?
SR: So what were the preconditions?
FINDLEN: First, no women were allowed to take degrees in what were considered the professions of the time -- namely, law, medicine and theology. But science was not a profession. It's the exact opposite of what we would probably think today; science -- or natural philosophy, as it was known -- was the easiest discipline for women to enter because it was so new, even though the content was so difficult to master. There was no professional infrastructure. For anyone who could develop a competency in Newtonian physics, the door was wide open.
SR: What was the philosophy during that period about women in education?
FINDLEN: At this time, there was also a raging debate about whether women should be formally educated. In a way, making a woman a professor in the most modern subject of the time -- science -- was the best way to demonstrate the most radical edge of this debate.
SR: Do later female scholars, such as Marie Curie, owe a debt of gratitude to Bassi?
FINDLEN: Not really. I think what we want is a kind of story,
in which each piece of the puzzle adds up to the whole -- that each woman
who enters science should set the preconditions for the next ones. What
you miss in saying that is the interruptions in the story and the ways
in which the story had to restart itself. For example, the 1950s were
a low point for women in university sciences, as opposed to the 1910s
and 20s. Likewise, the story of Laura Bassi was known extremely well in
her lifetime; people traveled all over Europe and beyond to see this woman
and others like her, and women aspired to her accomplishments for about
70 years after her degree in 1732. But outside Italy, she was quickly
forgotten after her death.
